


A Wake for the Dead, An Eye to the Future

by likethenight



Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 11:32:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6077748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the funerals of Tristan and Lancelot, Gawain and Galahad do a bit of babysitting, a lot of drinking, and a fair amount of talking about what to do next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Wake for the Dead, An Eye to the Future

**Author's Note:**

> This follows on directly from my earlier fic _[Two Funerals](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2832680)_.

After the funerals, Gawain and Galahad wandered up from the graveyard into the fortress, aimless and at a loss as to what to do for the first time since they had arrived here fifteen long years ago. There was plenty to do, but Jols was directing the clearing of the battlefield and seemed to have plenty of helpers, Woads and Romans and townsfolk working together; Arthur was still in the graveyard, Guinevere bending his ear again, and Bors was nowhere to be seen. 

“I feel odd,” said Galahad, scrubbing a hand over his beard as if it itched. “I don’t remember the last time we had nothing to do.”

“Neither do I,” Gawain agreed. “We could go and see if Jols needs a hand?”

Galahad shrugged. “He seems to be doing all right. Actually, I don’t know about you but I’m feeling a powerful need to get drunk out of my skull.”

Gawain paused to think it over for a moment, then let out a rueful chuckle. “Me too. Come on, then. Let’s go and see if the tavern’s open. I think I heard Bors say Vanora came straight back as soon as she realised the Saxons were defeated.”

They made for the tavern, and found that its doors were open, although there was nobody immediately visible when they poked their heads inside. But the fire was burning and it was warmer inside than out, so they went in and leaned on the bar, breathing in the familiar smoky atmosphere and sighing with relief that this, at least, had not changed.

Gawain was just about to suggest they go and find a flagon or two of ale themselves, since Vanora was clearly otherwise occupied, when there was a sound of flustered exasperation from the kitchen doorway and Vanora herself bustled in, trailed by several of her children and looking as though she was at the end of her patience.

“Sirs, I’m so sorry,” she said, rather breathlessly, “but the children are running me ragged and all the serving maids ran off south and didn’t come back and quite frankly I’m buggered if I know how I’m going to keep this place running. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Bors, have you?”

“Not since the funerals,” Gawain said with a smile. “Don’t worry about the wait, we were just pleased to be somewhere familiar. Do you want a hand with the little ones, while Bors is off wherever he is?”

“As long as you don’t mind us getting hammered drunk while we’re at it,” Galahad put in, never one to lose sight of his original objective, after all.

“You’re a pair of angels, you are,” Vanora declared. “Let me get you some ale and if you’ll keep an eye on this little horde of savages for me I’ll be eternally grateful.” She vanished back into the kitchen again, emerging a few moments later armed with two large flagons and a pair of tankards, which she set down on the nearest table. “There you go. Children! Sir Gawain and Sir Galahad are going to look after you for a while, so you are to be on your best behaviour and remember that both of them are warriors just like your father and they won’t hesitate to give you what for if you play them up.”

The children paused in their game of tag around (and on, and over, and under) the tavern tables for a moment, eight pairs of wide eyes set in grubby faces fixed upon the two knights, and then almost as one child they went back to running around chasing each other and yelling their heads off. Gawain and Galahad exchanged a look, and Vanora sighed.

“I do my best, but on a day like today none of them’s in the mood for listening. Too much energy to burn off after being good on the road yesterday. Are you sure you don’t mind them?”

“As long as you don’t mind us getting hammered drunk while we’re at it,” Galahad said again with a slightly rueful grin.

“I’ll be back before you can be that drunk,” Vanora laughed, and she left them to it. 

“What were we thinking?” Galahad said after a moment, heading over to the table with the ale and sitting down, pouring out two tankards full. 

“We’re helping Vanora while her man, our brother-in-arms, is unaccountably absent,” Gawain said. “He’s probably off somewhere with a flagon of wine talking to Dagonet, he’ll be back soon enough.”

“What if he isn’t?” There was a hint of barely-suppressed panic in Galahad’s voice, and Gawain chuckled. 

“I’m sure we’ll manage. It isn’t as though they’re taking a blind bit of notice of us, I reckon as long as we keep them from actually destroying the place, we’ll be fine. That’s all Bors ever does, anyway.” He took a long draught of his ale and sighed, beginning to feel a little more comfortable.

Galahad glanced around. “If I’m honest, I think I’m more afraid of this lot than I ever was of the Woads. Or the Saxons. With that lot, at least you know what you’re dealing with. This bunch of savages, you never know what’s going to happen next.”

“If they get too out of hand, you stand up and you draw your sword,” Gawain grinned. “They’ll be so fascinated they’ll forget to misbehave. For a moment or two, anyway.”

“Maybe we should throw a few knives,” Galahad suggested. “Take our minds off it.” He paused, shaking his head. “Or maybe not. I don’t know, it’s not the same without Tristan standing at the back eating his apple and beating us all without even trying.”

“No, it’s not,” Gawain agreed. “Maybe not today. But we ought to keep doing it. He wouldn’t want us to stop on his account. He’d say we still need the practice.”

Galahad gave a slightly shaky laugh. “He would, and all. Smug bastard. By all the gods, I miss him. Him and all the others. Even the ones I didn’t like, I even miss them. They were still our brothers. Our people. Now there’s just us. You, me and Bors, surrounded by strangers.”

“They’re not all strangers,” Gawain pointed out. “Some of them are our friends.”

“I know,” said Galahad, “but they’re not our people. Gods, I’m not nearly drunk enough to be talking like this.” He took a long drink from his tankard, only surfacing to breathe, a rough, desperate gasp, before gulping down the rest of the ale and banging the tankard on the table. “That’s better,” he mumbled breathlessly. “A little bit, at least.” He reached for the flagon and refilled his tankard, topping Gawain’s up before setting it down again. “Why us, Gawain? Why is it that we’re still here to drink ale and look after all Bors’ little bastards, when Dagonet and Tristan and Lancelot and all the others are all dead?”

Gawain shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just luck, or fate, or the will of the gods. Maybe they’ve still got plans for us.”

“But why not have plans for the others? What’s so special about us?”

“That question, I can’t answer for you. We’ll never know. They’re not in the habit of letting us in on it all, are they? We just have to trust them.”

Galahad snorted and took another long drink. “Well, as long as their plans include letting us take a few hours to get hammered drunk, then that’s fine. But I still don’t understand it. Anyway, what can they possibly be planning that needs us to stay _here_?”

Gawain shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps they’re intending for us to stay and help oversee the building of this new Britain of Guinevere’s. You know, make sure it gets done properly.” He drained his tankard and refilled it. “Perhaps their plans include us getting hammered drunk and making sure Bors’ brood of bastards don’t destroy Vanora’s tavern.” He reached out and grabbed Six by the back of the tunic as the boy hared past. “Slow down, boy,” he said mildly, “just a little bit, you don’t want to spend the rest of the day putting everything back together if your mother finds you’ve broken it all, do you?” The lad shook his head, eyes wide, and Gawain chuckled, letting him go. “Go on with you, but _slower_ , all right?” The boy nodded and then ran off again, very slightly slower than he had been running before. 

The two knights settled down to watch the children for a while, drinking a little more slowly now. 

“So what _are_ we going to do?” mused Galahad after a while. “Is this really our home now? Do we stay and help Arthur and Guinevere do whatever it is she wants to do?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Galahad. “All that time wanting to go home, and now that I can, I don’t know if I even want to. I don’t know what would be there for me. And I don’t want to go anywhere that you’re not.” 

Gawain couldn’t help but smile at the mulish look on Galahad’s face. “Well, I don’t want to go anywhere that you’re not, so we’re even on that count, at least. And you’re right, I don’t think there’s anything much left on the plains for us. Who knows if we’d even be able to find our families again, who knows if they’re even still there?” He paused, took a long drink. “Do you know what I think?”

Galahad shook his head over the rim of his tankard. 

“I think,” Gawain went on, “that perhaps our family is here, these days. Perhaps this is our home, after all. Perhaps these _are_ our people.” He took another drink, then went to refill his tankard; finding that the first flagon was empty, he began on the second. “Perhaps what the gods have in store for us is greater even than what they have laid out for us so far.”

“Perhaps,” Galahad began, in a fairly passable, if wobbly, imitation of Gawain’s voice, then made to knock back the rest of his ale; his tankard was empty and he found himself knocking back air instead. He dropped the tankard back onto the table, coughing hard, and Gawain reached over to thump him on the back. Once Galahad had stopped coughing long enough to take a proper breath, Gawain refilled his tankard and pushed it into his hands.

“Here, have a drink of that. You know what I mean, though. We chose to stay and fight for Arthur. Maybe that work isn’t yet done. He’ll need us by his side if he’s going to try uniting the Britons and the Romans and the Woads, after all.”

Galahad gulped at his beer and gave one final cough. “Not to mention if he’s going to try anything that minx of a Woad suggests. Someone’s going to have to look out for the poor bastard, I suppose.”

“Precisely,” Gawain grinned. “Shall we drink to that?”

“I’ll drink to it. Although the way I feel at the moment, I’ll drink to pretty much anything.” Galahad clanked his tankard against Gawain’s. “Here’s to looking out for Arthur. And looking out for Bors, too. He’s got Vanora and all his little bastards, but he lost his closest brother.”

Gawain nodded. “All of you looked out for me when I lost my little brothers. We need to look out for each other now, all three of us, because we’re the only ones left. And we need to look out for Arthur, because the gods know he won’t be looking after himself.”

“Never a truer word spoken.” Galahad drained his tankard. “You know, something tells me we’d be more useful actually helping Vanora with whatever it is she’s doing, than sitting out here watching her brood.”

“And something tells _me_ that if she’d wanted our help out there she’d have asked for it. I think we’re more use to her out of her way. Besides, you know how good she is at knowing what we need to do, even before we know it, sometimes. She knew we needed to drink ourselves stupid before we ever said anything about it.”

“She’s a good woman,” Galahad said, refilling their tankards with the last of the ale Vanora had given them. “Bors is in good hands, he’ll be all right. We’ll be all right, too, I suppose. Whatever the gods have in store for us.”

“Whatever the gods have in store for us,” Gawain echoed. “Perhaps we’ll stay, then, and help bring these people into whatever new world Guinevere has in mind. Not to mention helping bring up this horde of future warriors. Bors and Vanora do a good job but it’s only fair of us to help out. They’re our family too.”

“I suppose they are. Who’d have thought it, you and me at the edge of the world? You know, I’m beginning to think that just being able to choose might be good enough for me. Maybe it wasn’t the going home that I wanted, maybe it was just that I wanted to be free to choose what I did with my life. Maybe I’ve come too far away from Sarmatia for it ever to be home again.”

“Maybe we have. Maybe what we needed was the freedom to choose, like you say.” Gawain took a long gulp of ale. “I tell you what. Let’s see how things go, just for a few months, then we can decide for certain what we want to do. In the meantime, what say I go and refill these flagons and we carry on drinking each other under the table, just for now?”

“That’s the most sense you’ve made all day,” Galahad said, tilting his tankard in Gawain’s direction. “More ale now, proper decisions later. Only wise to see how the wind’s blowing before we make up our minds what we’re going to do.”

Gawain grinned, getting to his feet and picking his way between the children, still running rampant all over the tavern in their never-ending game of tag. He felt a little unsteady on his feet, although a flagon of ale each was nowhere near enough to make him and Galahad drunk. Tipsy, maybe, but not drunk; but then, they’d had a very long, very strange few days, and had anyone been there to take a wager, Gawain would have bet that there were other forces at work than simply the drink. Too much to think about, too much to feel, and he was suddenly very grateful to Vanora for giving them such a simple task to do, for knowing that they needed nothing more than to sit and drink and work out what their next move was going to be. She truly was a good woman, and a wise one, and Bors probably didn’t deserve her.

They had pieced together a good little family, he and Galahad, he thought to himself, refilling the flagons from the barrel. The pair of them, Bors and Vanora and all their children, and Arthur too. Not to mention Lucan, he’d be in need of support and a new family, especially if Gawain’s suspicion was right and Arthur had a mind towards bringing him up as a warrior for the new Britain. Time would tell if Guinevere would produce an heir, but Lucan would be a good one to hold in reserve. 

Gawain stopped himself at that, chuckling - who knew, really, at this stage, what was going to happen? Perhaps Guinevere only had her sights set on Arthur as a leader for her people, not as a husband for herself. There was that moment the previous night, when she’d come running after Arthur from his quarters, adjusting her clothing, but who was to say what that had meant? Gawain certainly wasn’t going to hazard any guesses. They were just going to have to see it through, put this new nation together and see what happened, all of them. Together.


End file.
